


saving space

by KestralWatcher



Series: saving space [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Asexual Character, Background immortal husbands, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Found Family, Freeform, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Immortality, Multi, Post-Movie, Team as Family, instead I had feels, this could have been 2k words on using swords in contemporary combat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:08:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25751113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KestralWatcher/pseuds/KestralWatcher
Summary: They never ask her to replace Booker, even without words. For Nile to fulfill his original role in this team (this family). (However much they are delighted to learn of her proficiency with modern technology. She is more at ease with handling the various communications with Copley, especially once she learns that Andy still prefers a flip phone and that Nicky has never even heard of the Gutenberg Project. Andy is a lost cause, but she orders Nicky a Kindle.)On not repeating the mistakes of the past.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: saving space [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1870753
Comments: 87
Kudos: 760





	saving space

**Author's Note:**

> Like many of you, this movie chewed me up, spat me out, and then demanded that I write fanfic for the first time in years. So, have a couple thousand words of free-form narrative with excessive use of parenthetical asides, because I never get to do this in my professional fiction life. Turns out I kind of missed it.
> 
> Not beta'd, because we only die when our time has come.

It takes nine days for Nile to realize that Joe and Nicky treat her differently after the events in London than they did in the brief time before. That it takes even that long is embarrassing enough, but day one is a blur of leaving the scene and patching up Andy and passing out from sheer exhaustion at a mid-range hotel. Day two is lost in shopping for clothes that aren’t disgusting and finding a salon that can fit her in because she won’t be sure all the blood and gore are out of her hair until the cornrows are gone, followed by the agonizing delicate balancing act between wanting to defend Booker and acknowledging the pain his actions had caused on the others. Day three is consumed by two air trips (in coach on a commercial airline, this time) and a train ride to a house in southern Italy, with day four absorbed in the rush of exploring a new place and preparing for an extended stay.

So, five days to recognize the difference in their attitudes, as more than just those of the changes of men at ease, not preparing for an attack around every turn. She’s embarrassed that it takes her even that long, but she stays quiet about it. Her appearance in this strange world is as much of a shock to them as it is to her, after all.

The home nestled in the Cambrian countryside is precisely that – a home. Not an uncomfortable safe house in an abandoned church or mine, but a place where hints of her new companions’ personalities shine through. No pictures, of course, but she finds touches of Joe in the artful décor, of Nicky in the quality of the kitchenware, and even of Andy in how the first-floor bedroom suite features at least two escape routes and a diving knife hanging from the shower caddy.

Joe directs her to the other bedroom on the second floor, pointing out the empty chest of drawers, how the attached bath also opens to the hallway, and the holster for a sidearm on the headboard. In the nights that follow, it means she wakes from the nightmares of endless drowning in the dark depths to a gentle touch and offer of tea from Nicky, or to freely given embraces and the distraction of funny cat videos on his phone from Joe.

(She does not ask why they didn’t offer her the furnished attic. They’d be able to get a night’s rest undisturbed from her unrelenting dreams of Quynh or at least have sex louder than the muffled hints she’s occasionally heard when waking to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. The attic features overflowing shelves featuring more books in French than not and at least three dusty, half-finished liquor bottles. That space is already spoken for, even if it won’t be inhabited again in too many decades.)

But after those first five days, she thinks she’s figured it out. They never ask her to replace Booker, even without words. For Nile to fulfill his role in this team (this family). (However much they are delighted to learn of her proficiency with modern technology. She is more at ease with handling the various communications with Copley, especially once she learns that Andy still prefers a flip phone and that Nicky has never even heard of the Gutenberg Project. Andy is a lost cause, but she orders Nicky a Kindle.)

Instead, they make space for Nile in a way she realizes they might not have with Booker, even during their long association. They are so different, for one: a grown man of the eighteenth century versus a young woman of the twenty-first. They got to her before she’d had a chance to reach out to her mother and brother. Gave Nile the agency to manage her “death” (via Copley – KIA versus AWOL, a haunting echo of her father’s fate but at least sparing them the agony of the unknown). Nicky sits with her on the veranda on her quieter days, allowing her to dance on the edge of the grief necessary to move on but drawing her back before she can spiral into guilt. There is wine with dinner, the occasional homemade sangria with an outdoor lunch. Andy keeps any of the hard liquor in the house stashed in her room, and Nile does not touch the bottles upstairs, even on the few occasions when oblivion is tempting.

In one of her few private, halting conversations with Andy in those first weeks, she learns that Booker felt alone in his unceasing grief while Nicky and Joe always have each other. Andy shares the story of Booker’s confession in the lab unflinching, but the darkness in her eyes warns Nile that she shouldn’t ask whether it is now Andy who is entirely alone with her grief. Andy made peace with her grief centuries ago, a constant if not comforting companion, whereas Booker’s anguish had always taken the form of active demons.

But merely redeeming their broken relationship with Booker isn’t the full point of how careful Joe and Nicky are with Nile. She sees it in Andy’s eyes sometimes, when her mentor watches the three of joking on the veranda, as she sits to the side. Andy will remain an essential part of this team for as long as possible, but they all know that one day Andromache of Scythia will only remain an untold legend on Copley’s board. That Nile and Nicky and Joe need to form the solid core in the new shape of this team, to make it through however many years it might be before Andy’s departure (death) and when they can welcome Booker home.

In return, Nile does not allow her new team (her new family) to pretend as if their brother never existed. Left to their own devices, probably acting as if each of the other three had taken the lead, they might ignore the gaping hole in their lives for the next century. Constantly tripping over words unspoken, tearing the scab off a wound that will not heal rather than adapting to the new shape of their lives. After all, Booker is not the only one who requires healing. Not only from the Merrick ordeal, but from years of unacknowledged pain.

So, Joe and Nicky make a point to include her in their lives, explaining shared jokes and teaching her how to cook without food that partially comes out of a box. Eventually, Nile also makes a point to acknowledge that Booker is part of their last two centuries of history. Both in their everyday lives (“What’s up with the awkwardly-placed chair in the dining room?” “That’s where Book read at night, where the light would not touch any of the boss’s windows.”) and the not-so-everyday, when their army of four spread their own brand of goodness at the end of a gun, the point of a blade.

(“Wait, so you’re telling me that you went _back_ into the house to get back your swords and Andy’s ridiculous ax, even after all you went through to get out?” “It’s a labrys. And yes.” “What happened to Booker’s sword?” “He does not carry one.”)

The following conversation, which mingled tactics and military history and the comparative ages of firearms versus the use of the longbow versus edged hand-to-hand combat, was one of the first where mention of Booker did not darken Nicky’s vivid eyes, did not pinch Joe’s lips, did not have Andy disappearing into her room for a bottle. Nile considers it a win in more ways than one, especially when she expresses an interest in learning more about blades than the basics with a knife she’d received as a Marine. In the end, after a rousing debate that dips out of English more than once, it is decided that Joe will teach her the dirtiest street knife-fighting he knows once Andy fully heals. She also wants to get Nile’s unarmed combat up to standards, and Nile has the memory of multiple broken bones to acknowledge the need for that.

Nile knows, without ever asking, that she avoids many of the original stumbling blocks to Booker’s initial insertion into the group. An American, who grew up in the digital era, when the Pride flag was as familiar as the American, who served in the U.S. military after the dismantling of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” She never blinks at Nicky and Joe’s relationship, never questions the physical affection, never has to battle inherent bias brought on by social and religious upbringing to acknowledge or accept the depth of their love.

She never flinches at the casual affection between them or that which they share with her and Andy, the sideways hugs in the kitchen, the kisses to the top of her head as they go up to bed as she remains glued to a ten-year-old Hollywood blockbuster on the television. Ostensibly because watching the familiar film dubbed in Italian helps her language skills, but mostly because they’ve been making eyes at each other since halfway through dinner and might appreciate an hour of unregulated volume.

(The physical affection stops for exactly four days after a shopping trip, when a brief interaction with a shop assistant presents Joe opportunity to tease. She responds with honesty, never considering otherwise. She doesn’t always recognize flirting when it’s directed toward her, because being ace means she’s never felt the urge to flirt back. Joe and Nicky’s attitudes toward her never change, but she accepts their withdrawn touch with the same quiet, aching reluctance she had when Dizzy stopped tossing her legs over Nile’s lap during movie night on base. It takes Nile two days to realize that her team (her family) treads old, dangerous patterns, one day to find an essay on the differences between asexuality and touch aversion and pin a printed copy to the fridge with a Disney Paris magnet, and one day for Nicky to draw her into his side with an arm thrown around her shoulders during movie night.)

After two trips with Joe to the nearest salon able to deal with Black hair an hour away in Catanzaro, she catches him watching beauty vloggers on YouTube. Her next few hairstyles are more basic, but Joe delights in learning the intricacies of a new form of artistry.

They all teach her Arabic, as one of the most common world languages and too often a useful language in the places that appear on Copley’s growing potential mission list. She learns Italian via cultural immersion. For too long, she thinks nothing of the way Nicky always makes a point to differentiate modern Italian versus the dead Genoese dialect only he and Joe seem to share. Until an off-hand comment from Nicky to Joe causes Nile to erupt in giggles but Andy shows no comprehension, and that is when Nile understands that the pair are keeping nothing from her.

They want no roadblocks to how she fits with them, no secrets to ever sow doubt as to her place in their lives.

Through gratuitous use of Google Translate, the first word Nile learns in too many languages is “sister.” In return, she perfects her accents of _fratello_ and _shaqiq_. They both envelope her in their arms when she drops an affectionately exasperated “bro” in mid-conversation and then crumbles at the memory of the younger brother she will never see again.

But Nile is a younger millennial, who paid it forward at the Starbucks drive-through before her last deployment, even when the two venti frappuccinos cost significantly more than her grande latte. Who says “no problem” because helping someone should be an act of service freely given rather than that of the expectation set by “you’re welcome.” Who understands that even as Nicky and Joe try so hard to make space for her in their lives, trying not to repeat the mistakes of the past, that her family is bigger than an army of four. That she owes it to Booker to save space for him in return because he deserves to keep his part of this family despite his past actions. Despite, or perhaps because of, how his pain had almost destroyed them all.

She prepares so many arguments, so many defenses, when she asks Copley for Booker’s cell number.

He returns her email in under a minute, the information freely given. He requires no explanation, does not comment on this flagrant violation of the price the others had demanded for the man’s sins. (She tells them anyway, over dinner that night. Joe looks away, brow furrowed but with no other response. Nicky drums his fingers on the table once, but the slight tilt in his lips is unmistakable. Andy nods once, wine glass dangling from her fingers, as clear a benediction as Nile might ever receive for the action.)

* * *

The text arrives early evening, before Booker has had more than the day’s first glass of cheap whiskey. He blinks at the smartphone through scratchy eyes, heart making an abortive leap in excess adrenaline at the unknown number. But he has already had weeks to resign himself. No more missions from Andy. No more memes from Joe, or pictures of a particularly beautiful sunset from Nicky.

He swipes open the phone.

 _Hey,_ mon frère _, it’s Nile. Been missing you_

Something tight in his chest loosens, the slightest, most minuscule amount. That doesn’t mean Booker has any idea how to respond to this girl he’d known so briefly. Before he can even try, three dots appear on the screen. More texts follow in rapid succession.

_Is this weird? I hope it’s not weird. You can tell me to bug off but I hope you won’t_

_They know I’m texting, btw_

_I think it’s going to be one of those things they DON’T TALK ABOUT, but I don’t care if you don’t_

A pause, after that mad flurry. If Booker had no idea how to respond before, he certainly doesn’t now.

But more dots, then:

_Did you know Andy has never seen Star Wars??_

He begins to tap out a response.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I completely embrace the idea that all these immortals are queer AF, but that should include the whole spectrum. No idea why I latched onto the idea of Nile as ace for this particular fic, but I rolled with it.
> 
> 2\. Highlander was my first fandom so I have THOUGHTS about featuring swords in contemporary combat. Trust me, that discussion could be an entirely separate fic.


End file.
